The Motorola RAZR is back

Oct10th
,
2017

The world is has been waiting a decade for a new Motorola Razr. Now the Motorola Razr is back. But this time it’s called the Binatone Blade. The design having been licensed to the British maker of budget-priced gizmos.

Putting the Motorola name on the new phone is clearly a step too far but this Binatone Blade phone isn’t a Razr in all but name. More of a tribute act. Think Proxy Music or Fake That, rather than the genuine article.

The licence deal between Binatone and Motorola dates back to before Motorola sold out to Google and the subsequent sale to Lenovo. As a result there have always been some quirky products with a Motorola badge and Binatone inside. Android DECT phone anyone?

Among the products are from this arrangement are accessories such as Bluetooth headsets which are every bit as good as the really rather good accessories Motorola used to make itself.

It was with an optimistic air I looked at the new blade, and I was disappointed. So much so that I met with Binatone to understand the decisions it had made in designing the new phone.

This leads to a note of caution. The phone I had bought on ebay shouldn’t have been there. It was an unfinished prototype with pre-production software which an unscrupulous beta tester had sold. And sold for so little it can’t possibly justify the monumental trouble it will have caused him or her.

Reviewing pre-production phones is however something I’ve spent a good amount of my life doing, as the editor or What Mobile magazine and then working at both Motorola and Sony Ericsson most of my phones had not-quite there software.

But it’s not the software I’m disappointed with. It’s not what the Razr was designed to be: an aspirational high end phone for Hollywood stars. It’s what the Razr became in a bid to keep Motorolas market share within sight of that of Nokia.

As sales slipped the price was reduced and the manufacture cost came down. But nothing became as cheap and plastic as the Binatone Blade. Binatone says that it can’t have built something which would have matched the original Razr because no-one would have bought it. That there is a reason why there are no beautiful, simple phones: there is no demand.

The easy to use phones we sell at Fuss Free Phones are mostly made by Doro. They are quite nice but nothing compared with the Nokia 8800, Motorola Aura or Sony Ericsson X5 of a decade ago. Phones that are selling for over £1,000 on ebay.

I dug out my 2003 Razr V3 for a side by side comparison. The Blade doesn’t fare well when you do that.

The new phone is a lot lighter, tipping the Fuss Free Phones postage scales at 67g to the Razr’s 96g. This might seem like A Good Thing. It’s said that in the early 2000s men in the phone industry all got together to boast about how small theirs was, but density matters. Work done by the brilliant Motorola researcher Steve Herbst produced guidelines on “perceived quality”. That is what makes something feel expensive, and a major element was density. Something that is heavy for its size gives the air of being well made. Razr is a little on the light side, Blade far too light.

The Razr has angled, or chamfered edges. This is a major part of the Motorola design language of the time. It came from an understanding that Nokia and Samsung all had an identifiable “look”, and while the V60, V70, Timeport et all looked good they had no design consistency. Chamfered edges were the new Moto Thing. Well Chamfered edges for “boys” phones and curves, in the form of the Pebl phone which was the “girls” phone. The Blade fails to capture the design.

The pictures here are ones I took at a secret internal Motorola workshop held in Kalamazoo in 2003. They show the original concept model of what was to become Razr and to set the design language.

Blade doesn’t just fail the language test it has a fussy coachline which fails to understand that the look was about simplicity. Blade doesn’t have a front screen, just icons for messages. Getting a colour screen into the flip of the Razr was a major engineering effort. At one time the proposal was monochrome screen. Blade also moves the camera to the back. From a practical point of view this doesn’t matter but, despite the camera being on the back of the concept it became part of the Razr ID.

Moving the camera and the lack of a screen are clearly part of the cost reduction: removing the need for a second circuit board between the screen and the case. A similar cost reduction is the lack of a chrome bevel on the hinge. Something Motorola was very good at was hinge design and Razr makes a feature of this. The blade fails to highlight the hinge on one side and apes the lanyard connector on the other but with a loop that is too small to thread a lanyard through.

While the Razr has two volume buttons on the left and a power button on the right, the Blade as a single rocker switch for volume on the right. The Razr button is on the flip, the blade on the base.

One of the many style innovations of the Razr was its etched keyboard. Something the Motorola head of design, Tim Parsey, told me would make sure it was a low volume product. He said that there was only one factory in the world which could make it and then only in limited quantities. Parsey must have been mistaken. Motorola found a way to make huge quantities. In various guises Motorola found a way to make 100,000,000 of the things.

No laser etched keyboard here. To make the keypad modern it’s used the font Eurostyle. This was cutting edge when it was designed, but that was in the early 1960s. Today it just looks like someone is trying too hard. The Binatone keypad predictably lacks the feel of the Motorola which has rubbery guides and a mechanical click. It’s not particularly tactile on the Motorola – a curse of making the phone thin – but there is even less travel on the Binatone. If opening the Blade is a disappointment then so is shutting it. While most of the Razr is metal, all of the Blade is plastic, so it doesn’t have the satisfying snap of a Razor.

There are some things the new Razr does which the old one did not. The Blade is a dual-SIM device, taking both a mini and micro SIM. It also has an MP3 player – you’ll want better headphones than the ones that come with it, but that’s pretty much a given with every phone you buy. To store your music there is a MicroSD slot. A technology that in the days of Razr was known as Transflash. And one of the things you can do with this is record calls. It’s not something I’ve seen in a feature phone before and is pretty rare in smartphones. Only Windows Mobile has it built in.

This one feature alone might justify the Blade, but it’s the wrong “just one feature”. I’ve not written about the software but I can confidently say that the Blade has done a better job than the Razr.

The original Razr used the diabolical Motorola software known as P2K. Three letters which sum up why Nokia beat Motorola. But the manufacturing and style was fantastic.

The new Blade is not currently on sale but will be available shortly through Carphone Warehouse and other major retailers at under £50. Binatone told me that it would have been impossible to sell something like the 2003 phone today. Razr was conceived as a $1,000 phone, the price only came down because it sold in millions and in the end because Motorola was so desperate for market share it was sold at a loss.

Binatone is positioning the new Blade as a fun second phone, or a festival phone. It’s not the status symbol the original was. The world is has been waiting a decade for a new Motorola Razr. It’s still waiting.